Show that lets Austen speak for herself

Kim Hicks has been performing her one-woman Jane Austen stage show for 45 years. She tells JANET HUGHES about her acting heritage, being the ‘Voice of Judo’ and her passion for Austen's words.

- 

Hi! Who can ever be tired of Jane Austen? As thousands celebrate the 250th anniversary of the writer's birth at the largest Jane Austen Festival in the world in Bath, it’s clear her fans certainly aren't.

And with filming just started on a Netflix remake of her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice starring The Crown star Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennett and Jack Lowden as Mr Darcy, it seems the global TV and film audiences are not yet bored with adaptations of her work either.

Even Kim Hicks isn’t tired of her. Forty-five years after launching the longest-running Jane Austen stage show in the world, the professional West Country actress still revels in the words of the 19th-century author many believe to be only second to Shakespeare in her skill with the English language.

Kim, 66, a regular sellout performer at the Bath festival, has been a fan of Austen’s wit and style since reading all six novels as a young woman. “It’s fascinating to me having done the very same pieces all these years, and apart from Covid I don't think a year has gone past without me doing at least a couple of performances, I never, ever tire of doing them,” she said.

“I love doing them because her writing is so fantastic. On the very odd occasion when my memory slips a little bit and a word evades me, I can invent a similar world to fill the gap and it’s never as good as the word she chose. She is a divine writer.”

Kim, 66, started Austen long before Colin Firth created a national swoon by stepping out of the pond in an unbuttoned wet, white shirt while playing Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Indeed, Kim did not include Darcy in her show when as a 21-year-old, unemployed new graduate of a three-year drama course at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School she first decided to take the writer's musings on romance on the road.